by R. B. Fields
Try this, shithead. I lunge at him with my knife, twisting the blade into the spot where his heart should be, and cry out as the vampire’s black blood spurts across my hand — sprays my face too. Colder than I expect, but as it drips down my cheeks and over the line of my jaw, it begins to burn. Go down, fucker. He’s supposed to die. This knife is supposed to hurt them. My skin tightens as if resisting his poison — his blood.
I wrench the blade free as a second creature, bigger than the first, slinks in from the hallway, its face twisted with rage. I jump back, but I’m not fast enough; it sinks its teeth into my elbow, the muscles sizzling as if each fang is a white-hot poker. I scream, and the creature releases me and shrieks too, perhaps regaling the others with its victory — its lips are red with my blood. The first vampire falls to his knees, his hands over the hole in his chest.
I’m going to die here. But at least I’ll take a few of them with me. I square my shoulders and raise the knife again.
The second vampire is still shrieking, but has taken a step back — spitting on the floor. I edge toward him, weapon ready —
His head flies across the room and splatters against the wall in a shower of bone and brain.
I blink stupidly, momentarily stunned. The first vampire is still alive, but barely, inching his way toward the far wall on his knees, but he freezes as Markula, golden hair flying, leaps over the threshold with his hands outstretched — claws. His nails have grown the way his teeth have, elongated to viciously sharp points. The gristle of the ringleader’s shoulder splits under Markula’s thumb, and the limb drops to the floor, but I can’t hear the sound it makes against the wood. I can’t feel the blood on my face anymore. The room wavers.
From somewhere below comes the clattering of metal, then a heavier sound that might be someone, or something, hitting a wall.
Markula narrows his eyes at me — those brilliant red eyes — and frowns.
But I can barely see him. And though I can’t feel my face, my arm is on fire — all my insides are on fire, my veins like lava. Blood … it’s my blood.
That’s the last thing I register before the world goes black.
19
Silas
She’s already dead, though she does not know yet.
Dawn lays limp on the floor, the bodies of the dead vampires littered around her. Blood covers her face, her shirt, and even from here, I can see the gouges in her flesh — long, sticky open wounds. This isn’t like when Mikael attacked her, when the only blood he spilled stayed soaking the fabric of his pants.
Now she has vampire blood in her veins.
There is a guilty pleasure in this; that she has been accidentally shoved into immortality. Markula cannot object to her staying with us now — we cannot leave a new vamp to fend for herself.
Kain looks on from the hallway; Draynor’s face is pained. Markula crosses his arms. “We don’t know that they’ve turned her.”
Impossible — he’s impossible. “She has their blood in her wounds, but we should make her ours. We can’t let her turn by their hands.” Her sweet blood will sour if we allow this to progress — savage blood will make her vicious. We can only hope our blood, the gentler energy that runs through our veins, might turn her to be more like … us. And if it doesn’t …
Her eyes flutter, the black blood that cakes her face crackling like a skin of drying mud. She moans. “I don't feel well,” she whimpers, and god help me, it’s the first time in a century that I can remember being afraid.
“I’ve got her,” Draynor says. She’s limp in his arms as he carries her to the bathroom, Kain and I at his heels.
The spa tub will not do, not for this — we need to clean her, bleed the tainted fluids from her wounds. The walk-in shower is as large as the tub, large enough for all of us.
Draynor sits on the marble ledge, Dawn in his lap with her back against his chest. I hit the water. She jolts in his arms — a seizure? No, just the cold. I forget how sensitive humans are. I turn the heat up, and Kain passes me a cloth and the soap — there is no soap that will fix a vampire bite, but it should help to release the particles and loosen any clotted blood. Humans need antibacterials, antibiotics, but soon … soon she won’t need either.
“Something’s wrong,” she moans, her eyes still closed. “I’m not feeling well.”
“You already said that, my love,” I whisper. “But we’ll fix it.”
I kneel before her as Draynor lifts her hips. We ease the skirt and her panties down her legs, and I unstrap the knife holster from her thigh — the knife itself is gone, probably laying on the floor of that bedroom. Kain has already taken her boots and removed one sock, but she shudders as his fingertips brush her bare foot, almost as if he’s shocked her. Draynor frowns at him.
Kain grabs her other stockinged foot, but when she flinches again, I lay a hand on Kain’s shoulder. “We’ll handle this. You get the blade, put it somewhere safe.”
I don’t bother waiting for his reply, and by the time I turn back, Draynor has already peeled off her tank top. We work quickly, and in seconds, she is nude, the water pouring over her body. Beautiful, always beautiful, but horrifically injured; her arm is a shredded mess. She’s missing a chunk of flesh and muscle near her elbow — will she be able to use it after she becomes one of us? Injuries sustained while turning sometimes persist afterward. But one thing is sure: her life is forever changed. Because of me.
I should have been there.
“Oh, my love, I’m sorry.”
She whines softly as I take the cloth to her face, and Draynor holds her tighter, whispering against her hair — trying to calm her. I wipe the grime from her forehead, her lovely cheek, then lower over her shoulder, scrubbing her flesh as best I can, quickly, efficiently, the floor of the shower going red. The wounds are seeping, some bleeding freely, especially along her bicep and elbow. The gashes are worse than I imagined, deep lacerations that form caverns across her arm and snake over her ribs. Markula was wrong to think they hadn’t turned her even for a second.
Draynor’s eyes are on her wounds, too, his face drawn. “We don’t have a choice.”
She gasps — her eyes snap open. Wide and blue and terrified. “Don’t have a choice? Are you going to kill me? Please don’t, I won’t hurt you, I swear I won’t use the knife.”
Draynor raises an eyebrow at me but strokes her wet hair. I look into her face. “You’re already dead, my love. But you can be one of us instead of one of them.”
“Already dead,” she echoes. “The bite?”
I nod.
Her lip trembles, maybe she’s even crying, but I can’t tell with the water pouring down her pale cheeks. I wipe at a dark spot behind her ear, and when I pull the cloth back, something gelatinous comes with it. Black and thick — a stripe of flesh. I shake it into the drain, rinse the cloth, and lather it up again.
She meets my eyes — more alert, but is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is she already turning? “Have you ever … shared a woman before?” she asks.
“That’s the question you want answered right now?” I say. I can’t hear her thoughts — I hate that I can’t hear her right now — but I know what she’s doing. She needs the distraction.
“No,” Draynor says. “We’ve never had a reason to share a woman.” He meets my eyes, his jaw tight. We’re running out of time.
I lift her arm and go more aggressively at the lacerations on her ribs, and this time, she screams. My chest aches. Draynor presses his cheek against the top of her head and closes his eyes, breathing deeply. She relaxes against him once more. The flesh below her ribs and over her thighs is pink with diluted blood, some of it a darker shade that can only be vampire. Her body is trying to fight it, to force it out, but I can already see throbbing abscesses forming around the wounds — the venom is walling itself off in her body. In her veins.
“But … you have a reason to share now?” Her voice sounds sleepy, but she hisses a sharp inhale when I apply the cloth to her knee, then
the silken skin over her thighs, covering her with bubbles. The cuts there are smaller, but they’re crusted in black — congealed vampire blood. “Oh god, I don’t even know why I’m saying all this,” she says.
I can guess why — Draynor has calmed her, loosened her tongue. “Do not worry, my love. You’re free to speak your mind here, unlike that ridiculous society you come from.”
“My love? What is this, an 1800s romance novel?” She forces a smile, but her eyes are tight with pain.
Draynor chuckles, a thick baritone that makes Dawn vibrate in his lap. “Time may pass, but this doesn’t mean we’ve left behind all forms of chivalry.”
“You were alive then, huh?”
The water in the drain is finally running clear, but that’s not a good thing — the bite on her elbow is no longer bleeding. Venom tends to abscess around the original wound once the toxins trip the immune system, but it never lasts long. Soon the abscesses will rupture, and venom will flood her body — there will be no way to stop it then.
“If you really want to be chivalrous,” she whispers, “don’t let me be like them.”
Draynor meets my gaze.
I raise my wrist to my lips. I don’t even feel my teeth go in.
Dawn blinks at me as I lower my bleeding arm toward her lips, but she allows Draynor to draw her chin up, the back of her head resting against Draynor’s shoulder. She opens her mouth wide.
I shiver as her tongue lashes out at my wrist, tentative at first, then hungry, her good hand pulling me tight against the suction of her mouth as she drinks from me. I want to touch her, to hold her the way Draynor is, but I can barely stand upright. A heady kind of wooziness is tugging at me, and I have to lean against the wall of the shower to stay on my feet.
Her teeth sink into my flesh.
I moan. Painful, oh it hurts, but it shouldn’t — human teeth cannot inflict damage. Still, I cling desperately to the wall of the shower. Draynor pulls her tighter to him, surely trying to calm her, but she struggles against him, clamping my wrist to her mouth, sucking at my veins with everything she has. Her elbow is larger now, like a softball, but she’s using that arm to hold me to her lips. As if it doesn’t hurt. As if it’s healing.
We have to stop this. We’re out of time. If she turns in here …
None of us will be able to contain her.
But if we tie her up, we should be able to keep her sane while it happens.
20
Dawn
I’m wet and shivering when they carry me to the bedroom and lay me down, but my mouth is hot and tastes of iron — burning, burning, burning. It’s not the same as the sizzling sensation when that asshole bit me, not the same as that horrible creature’s claws slicing through my flesh. The blood on my lips feels right in a way no food ever has. It lingers in my mouth, a warmth more akin to a good brandy. But better than any drink. Better than any pill.
Better than anything.
Yet, I can’t seem to determine whether I feel better. Nausea tugs at me, my guts resisting the blood, fighting against the toxins that are now flowing through my veins. I fear I might vomit. As part of me rejoices, the other weeps; it’s as if two halves of my body are at war with each other, literally fighting between life and death. Is this how it happens? How it feels for everyone?
I barely register them explaining the restraints, but I don’t need to hear it; I get the gist — I’m going to turn. It’s going to hurt, and badly, worse than anything I’ve ever felt, and I’ve been hurt a lot. Draynor will try to keep me calm the way he did in the shower.
But I need to stay here, resting beneath this fine skin of covers, letting the toxins take me. And if they were too late when they tried to flush my system with their own blood, if the venom of the rogue vamps is stronger than Silas’s …
I won’t be able to stay here. I’ll be a creature of the night, prowling for food like Mikael. Stalking women on the boardwalk. Killing pediatricians in parking lots.
But the doctor … no. Silas ate him. Draynor. Apparently, there’s no escaping that type of viciousness, and yet, I’d somehow forgotten until this moment, when I’m already shackled to the bed. Ironic that I’d been able to ignore it while they were cleaning me — I blame Draynor for that. He’s standing at the foot of the bed now, talking in hushed tones with Silas, but I feel the calm radiating off him — a vibration against the pads of my toes.
I steel myself, and the peace I had moments ago vanishes, as if I’ve banished Draynor’s calming influence from my mind, my body. Panic rises fast and hot, and the blood on my teeth is suddenly vile and bitter. Oh god, what did I sign up for? I’m going to die for this, for them — I might not be myself after tonight. I’ll be one of the monsters I always tried to put away, but I’ll be stronger, more horrible than any serial killer could ever be. And suddenly I’m sixteen again, listening to my mother being torn limb from limb, and when I peer out from my position under the bed, I see her beautiful blue eyes staring back at me, her neck a jagged mess of exposed bone and torn muscle.
I can’t breathe — my god, I can’t breathe.
“Dawn?”
I snap out of the memory in time to see Draynor lower himself into a chair at the side of the bed; he leans his elbows against the mattress near my good arm. He feels more imposing than usual — perhaps because I’m tied up. Sick.
Dying.
Draynor lays a hand against my forehead, and the heat of his palm bleeds into my veins. The tension in my abdomen eases against my will, but I press against it, forcing that calm away. It works; my ankles sting where they’re tethered to the footboard, and the gashes in my flesh throb — my elbow pulses with every heartbeat, a hollow kind of ache like a dead tooth. I tug at my arms, feeling the leather cuffs tighten. I almost ask why they had restraints here, why they were all ready for a captive, but my lips are dry. My throat hurts.
Everything hurts.
But there’s one thing I need to know. “Why him?” My voice shakes, and I fucking hate that — hate that I’m vulnerable.
“Why who?” Silas asks, his violet eyes hooded with concern.
“You killed that man,” I croak. “If I have to murder innocent people … I don’t think I can do this.”
“Humans are idiots.”
I turn my head, sending a bright stabbing through my temples. Markula stands in the doorway, his giant arms crossed, all those tribal tattoos as brilliantly red as if he’s been painted in blood. His head touches the top of the door frame.
“That doesn’t mean you have to kill them,” I rasp, but my throat does not hurt nearly as much — no … it doesn’t hurt at all. Is this Draynor’s work? Or am I already half dead?
“We do. We do have to kill them,” Silas says quietly. He lowers himself into the chair at the foot of the bed.
“Can’t you … can’t we just eat cows or something?” My stomach rolls. I gag, then swallow hard, trying to avoid puking.
Silas shakes his head. “That’s not the way it works. It is not the meat — we feed on energy as much as blood.”
“So you’re draining their … what? Life force?” What a hokey fucking way to put it, but I can think of no better phrase. “I don’t really care what part you’re ingesting. I’ve spent my life trying to save people, so when Kain said you were going to help someone … ” Rage burns hotter than the heat in my throat, in my belly.
“We save you from yourselves every time we feed,” Markula snaps. “We take care of the people you won’t.” Markula steps into the room, towering over me — over us all. “The man you watched us feed on? That innocent doctor? He abused twenty-two children. Every time he got caught, he paid the family off and moved to another state. When he did get arrested, he was acquitted because the boy was too frightened to testify. He never even lost his medical license. He would have practiced forever because you people are too stupid to protect the most vulnerable among you.”
The world recedes and pulses into being once more. “Twenty-two? How do you — ”
“There’s no need for a trial when you can hear their thoughts, when you can see into their souls,” Markula growls, and I swear I see his fangs snap together like the closing of a mousetrap. But when I blink, his jaw is hard, but his teeth are normal. “Humans are the weakest of the species. Not only do they bow to their most carnal of desires, they have no self-control, no regard for what their behaviors might do to others. Even the honeybee fights for the good of the hive.” My entire body chills, the overhead light eclipsed by his shadow. “Vampires will always exist because we have rules that few of us are brazen enough to break. Until now. You dragged us into a war we aren’t prepared to fight. Vampire against vampire … we’re no better than your kind, fighting one another like imbeciles. Perhaps we should let all your people die.”
I wish my hands were free so I could punch him square in the dick. Sure, he’d probably rip me limb from limb, but fuck this guy. “But then you’d have no food, right?” I sneer.
His gaze darkens. “We could breed you for food — there are those of our kind who do. You and your offspring can be drained over and over.” He crouches down beside the bed — only his shoulders and face are visible above the line of the duvet. “Your blood would be bitter. But we’d live.” He draws one finger up and over the plane of my cheek — cold, far colder than the touch of the other vamps.
“Why bitter?” That’s the question I want an answer to? Am I high? Maybe. My arm isn’t aching any longer, and though my ribs sting, the bright burning in my throat has vanished.
But I’m still shaking. My teeth are chattering — were they doing that before?